


Dollmaker

by ElementalSides (Syrika)



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Broken Bones, Burn Wounds, Decapitation, Dolls, Existential Angst, G/T, Major Character Injury, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Suicidal Thoughts, Surgery, Torture, bad things happening to everyone!!!!!, it's not even for me tbh, particularly virgil!!!!!!!!!!!, this ain't for everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:43:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrika/pseuds/ElementalSides
Summary: Mara moved one of his arms up and down, as if testing that the joint worked. The uneasy feeling increased. Virgil felt like he should be somewhere else, doing something else. As a doll, he innately understood that his purpose was different than humans, but he wasn’t even sure what that was.“Um...Mara?” he asked. “Why am I here?”“I created you,” Mara said, nudging his back upright so he sat on her palm.“Oh. Why?”She huffed a little bit. Virgil recognized it as a laugh. “You’re an existential one, aren’t you? You’ve only been around for a few minutes.”“It’s just on my mind,” Virgil said, attempting a shrug. “If you don’t know what you’re doing with me, can you put me down? I want to look around or something.”Mara pressed her lips in a thin smile. “What makes you think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing with you?”***Written for the 2018 Sanders Sides Reverse Big Bang. Please read with caution and heed the tags. 'Mara, see, she’s not gentle with her creations.'





	1. welcome to your life

**Author's Note:**

> If you didn't read the tags, this story has blood and suicidal thoughts and bone breaking and gore in it!!!! If you are uncomfortable with those things to any degree, please turn back now!
> 
> I wrote this story to go along with @im-a-space-ace's artwork for the Reverse Big Bang headed by @sanderssidesfanfiction! My own tumblr is @the-elemental-sides.
> 
> Link to the artwork is here: https://im-a-space-ace.tumblr.com/post/184350092884/heres-my-big-bang-work-and-it-goes-with
> 
> If that link doesn't work, you can find the art on im-a-space-ace under the tag #tw gore or on sanderssidesfanfiction under the tag #sanders sides reverse bang (it's Piece 6 from 2018).

Virgil’s first sensation was of light pressure around his arms and legs. Something gripped his arms and gently tilted him this way and that. He kept his eyes tightly shut, hoping that whatever it was would go away and he could return to sleep.

A large thing brushed over his eyes, and Virgil blinked them open. A face framed with curly gray hair loomed over him. Her hands turned him to the side, and she brought him up to her face as if closely examining a flaw.

“Here.” Though Virgil was still in a daze, the woman placed him on unsteady feet on a smooth wooden work surface. When he nearly toppled over, she caught him by the arm. He hung like a ragdoll for a second as she helped him shrug into a warm black jacket with a gray pattern woven into it with fine threads.

“Complete,” she said with satisfaction, peering down at Virgil as he straightened upright. “Now, Virgil, can you hear me?”

Virgil opened his mouth and found with surprise that he could speak. “Yeah.”

Her iron-gray brows knotted over pale, colorless eyes. “Can you see? Are you cold?”

“Yes...no.”

She brought out a book and opened it to a random page. Virgil couldn’t read the scribbles on the pages, though he recognized them as letters. But he could count to 10 when the woman asked, and assured her he could go higher. He knew the air was cool and the trees were green. He knew she was a human, one getting on in years, and the white thing pacing around her feet was a dog. And he knew that he, Virgil, was a doll.

“My name is Mara,” the woman informed him, picking him up again so she could examine him from all angles. Her touch bothered him less through the thick fabric of his jacket. He noticed that the thumb, pointer, and middle finger of her right hand were wrapped in thick white bandages.

There was a churning sensation in his gut, one that Virgil couldn’t recognize, and  he looked around to distract himself. He was in a snug home with cream-colored walls, certainly a big place for a little doll like himself but a bit cramped for a human being like Mara. He first zeroed in on the exits: three windows crawling with ivy and flowering plants, and curtains in the front and back that must have been sheltering some other rooms. The floor was clean and free of junk, but the shelves were lined with tools of all kinds: knives, surgical things, yarn, needles, ribbons, fabrics, syringes, glass, and more that was blocked from view by a huge metal furnace taking up nearly half the room. It was rusty, but it’d once been a dark, steely gray. A fire roared in its center. 

Mara moved one of his arms up and down, as if testing that the joint worked. The uneasy feeling increased. Virgil felt like he should be somewhere else, doing something else. As a doll, he innately understood that his purpose was different than humans, but he wasn’t even sure what that was.

“Um...Mara?” he asked. “Why am I here?”

“I created you,” Mara said, nudging his back upright so he sat on her palm.

“Oh. Why?”

She huffed a little bit. Virgil recognized it as a laugh. “You’re an existential one, aren’t you? You’ve only been around for a few minutes.”

“It’s just on my mind,” Virgil said, attempting a shrug. “If you don’t know what you’re doing with me, can you put me down? I want to look around or something.”

Mara pressed her lips in a thin smile. “What makes you think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing with you?” 

An alarm bell screeched in Virgil’s head so loudly that he cringed in her grasp. But he’d hardly moved when Mara’s bandaged thumb and index finger tightly squeezed his right arm at the elbow and, with a quick, practiced motion, snapped it in half.

The shock came first, a wave of quick sharp numbness that strangled every nerve in his arm. He shuddered like the raging furnace turned to ice. Then the pain hit. Virgil sat bolt upright with a piercing scream, his left hand instinctively flying to his elbow. It sent another jolt of pain through him that made his head swim. For seconds or minutes, the only thing he could feel was the rapid thump of his heartbeat and the pain cutting through his elbow like a scythe.

Mara reached forth, pinched his shoulders, and lifted him into the air. The pain crackled through his useless, dangling arm. She examined him with a frighteningly clinical air. She took his arm and bent it the wrong way, revealing the way his skin, realistic in every other sense, split like a thousand tiny threads ripped in half. She bent it further. Inside his arm was stuffing, regular dolls’ cotton, dripping thickly with red bloody liquid that Virgil knew held the magic that brought him to life. The only thing giving him structure was a simple skeletal frame. The jointed tube had snapped, revealing the black hollow within the bone.

Virgil did not stop screaming.

Mara sighed through her nose but said nothing. She picked up a needle pre-tied to a string of flesh-colored thread and jabbed it into Virgil’s elbow. His lower arm had started peeling away from all the jostling, so Mara sewed the arm back on one stitch at a time. He could feel every time the needle pierced the skin, every inch that the needle - small, but to a doll like him as long as his thigh - slid in and out in excruciating motions.

It couldn’t be real. Every inch of Virgil’s body told him to reject this, to go back to sleep, to get  _ away _ . This wasn’t what existence was. Why had he been woken up for this?

“Stop!” He was barely aware of his own voice. “Stop! It hurts! Why are you-!”

“All right, that’s enough.”

The left hand came down again, holding a tiny scrap of cloth that she dipped in a dish of clear liquid. Mara forced Virgil to lie flat on the table and draped the cloth over his nose and mouth. He kept kicking and struggling, but he started to feel detached and hazy, his breaths turning uneven and deep.

His arm was still broken inside, but the stitching was done. Mara rummaged through her supplies once more and came up with a few rolls with what looked like thick, rough fabric. She peered closely into Virgil’s face, making him feel like he was going to vomit despite never having eaten anything in his short life.

“Purple eyes,” said Mara. “Good, I have a matching cast left.” And as she plucked out a strip of violet material and wound it tightly around Virgil’s broken arm, he finally drifted into a stupor.

***

Sensation came back to him, and with it, absolute terror. Virgil leaped up before he was even fully awake and ending up bashing his shoulder on something flat and hard. He staggered back.

His heart pounded rapidly. His whole body trembled. He might have thought he’d just woken up from a nightmare if not for the scratchy purple cast that tightly bound his right arm in place. Most of the pain was gone, but the memories of his arm being snapped like it was nothing sent residual jolts through his nerves.

The old lady, the tormentor, was nowhere to be seen. Virgil was in a glass box, a foot high and six inches wide: just enough room for him to sit, not quite enough to stretch his legs. Tiny holes peppered the top (he needed to breathe?) and one of the walls, the one facing the giant furnace, had tiny hinges on the side. Virgil went for that wall and pushed, then yanked at the hinges, but nothing moved.

“It’s locked,” said a voice.

Virgil spun around. He wasn’t the only one in a cage. Across the room were scattered at least a dozen boxes, maybe even more outside of his line of sight. And in nearly all of them was a tiny human-shaped doll. 

The one who had spoken was in a glass case right next to Virgil’s. He sat on the ground and watched Virgil as if standing was too much of an effort. A chill ran down Virgil’s spine as he realized that the other doll looked exactly like him. In fact, every doll in this room was identical aside from the clothes they wore and the various unnerving injuries - not all had casts, some had bruises or bandages or braces - they sported. And the color of their irises were different. The one next to Virgil had bright yellow eyes that seemed to look right through him.

“Locked?” Virgil said faintly. “It’s - it’s - what am I doing here? What are we? Why did she break my arm? Please, you have to - you have to - “

“Calm down, all right?” the doll said, raising his hands. “Seems like you’re hysterical.”

“Yeah, I have a good reason to be!” Virgil’s voice cracked. His throat was so rough from screaming earlier that his voice was guttural.

“How about you just breathe.”

He forced himself to follow the yellow-eyed doll’s advice. His eyes wandered further to notice that each of the glass cases had a plaque pinned beneath it with letters scrawled onto the paper. Something told him that those letters spelled out the dolls’ names. But, like before, he still wasn’t able to read.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The doll chuckled. “That’s your next question?”

“Those plaques…”

“Oh. Don’t worry about those, they’re temporary. There’s a high turnover rate.”

“A high turnover rate…?”

“Absolutely. Mara, see, she’s not gentle with her creations.”

“Mara,” Virgil whispered, his hand drifting to his elbow. “Please - I don’t know who you are, but you have to help me. Why are we trapped here? And why did she do that to me?”

“To  _ you?”  _  The yellow-eyed doll laughed. “Virgil, right?”

“You can read?”

“Virgil, listen. You’re not special. In fact, she was just testing your flexibility today. Fixed you right up afterwards. Mara is going to do a lot worse to you - to all of us - before she can’t patch you up right and you end up bleeding out on her little operating table.  What do you think happened to the doll in that case before you?”

“I don’t understand. Why is she doing this to us?”

The yellow-eyed doll turned his head, then, to meet Virgil’s gaze. The sight of his face struck Virgil with horror. The left half was red, puffy, and raw, like it’d been scraped against a rough surface and left to fester. His bright eye peeked out from a swollen eyelid.

“Mara is the greatest healer in Sandenwood. Maybe even the world. Legend says she can fix any broken bone, set any shoulder, sew any wound, remove any tumor. And as we all know, she didn’t get that way without plenty of low-stakes practice.”

“This can’t be real,” Virgil breathed, sinking to the floor of his tiny glass prison. “She couldn’t do that to us. We can’t exist. Not for this.”

“And yet we do,” the doll said. He smiled. “Welcome to your life. I think you’ll like it here.”

 


	2. just a nice old lady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life continues. Virgil goes on an unexpected trip.

Virgil’s broken arm healed quickly.

It was by design, of course, because it would only get broken again soon enough. This was Virgil’s routine. Every day the dollmaker, Mara, would choose one or two of her little dolls in their little glass cases and perform some kind of surgery on them. Casts for broken arms, legs, fingers. Tourniquets for terrible wounds. Maybe she would cut their stomachs open entirely and slip a little foreign object inside, then operate the next day to remove it.

It was surgery designed to heal a human, but what did it do for the dolls? And what kind of earthly use was removing all of a doll’s bones so she could chuckle as they flopped around like a rag? She had more than a little cruel streak; no, she was sadistic, and Virgil was positive the only reason she became a healer was to have a healthy way of surrounding herself with the blood and bones and pain of other humans.

That first night, Virgil cried until his voice broke. Now, some number of days later, he found that making noise wasn’t worth the effort, and certainly not worth giving her the satisfaction. There he lay that afternoon on Mara’s bloody little operating table, surrounded by needles and threads, as she broke open his jaw and took a good look at his tiny teeth made out of chips of white buttons. She wasn’t even a dentist. She just liked to surprise her little patients by mixing it up a bit.

The end, when she patched up Virgil’s various newly inflicted wounds, wasn’t nearly the worst part. The feeling of his skin getting stitched was still horribly painful and strange, but he adjusted. In fact, it was more tedious than anything, and by this point Virgil just wanted to go back to his glass prison and go to sleep. He lay there while the thread wove around the split skin on his jaw.

What startled Virgil most, and did cause him to let out a soft yelp and then wince as he snapped a stitch, was the sudden banging in the front room, as if someone was hammering on the door, followed by the noise of the knob turning. Faster than Virgil could blink, Mara had swept him into her black canvas bag of medical supplies and sealed it shut. “I’m coming!” she called.

The bag swayed as Mara hurried to the source of the noise. Virgil tried to find something to grab onto, but he was met with slippery fabric walls. A syringe pressed against Virgil uncomfortably. Outside, the heavy curtain rustled as Mara drew it shut, hiding her doll workshop from view.

The door squealed open and a breathless young man entered Mara’s home. “Doctor Mara, I’m so sorry, but there’s been an emergency in town square,” he panted.

“Tell me.”

“My partner was struck by a piece of the old clock tower, you know, the one weakened by the storm. It hit the side of his head and gave him a bad cut on the shoulder. He’s unconscious, Elliott and I carried him to—“

“All right, calm down, Corbin,”  Mara said briskly, “just walk me to where I need to be.”

Though it was difficult to pay attention from within the bag, Virgil almost immediately found that Mara among humans was completely unlike the person she was among her dolls. She was sharp, but not cruel; she had a dry sense of humor but a kind word for every passersby. “How is that leg, Dot?” she’d ask, and an indistinct woman’s voice cheerfully replied.

He heard more muffled human conversations until Mara stopped, and another door swung open. The light changed as they went indoors.

“He’s here,” Corbin’s voice said softly. Virgil’s bag swung and then set heavily on a surface as Mara knelt down. He heard a soft moan of pain.

“Can you hear me, Sloane?” Mara asked. There was no response. Mara clicked her tongue and started to open her medical bag. Virgil curled into a ball at the very bottom, trying to minimize his presence – he had no clue what she’d do if he angered her somehow. 

Mara pulled out a few herbs and got to work. The inside of the bag was stuffy, and Virgil dozed, losing track of the time. 

The difference when Mara was with other humans versus when she was with her dolls was astounding. Her stony coldness became brisk professionalism, her cruelty became care.  Were the dolls worth it after all if practicing on them gave Mara the skill to save lives…? Virgil was so sick with emotion that he didn’t know how to process it all. He curled up and tried to block out the sound.

When the bag rustled, Virgil snapped to attention so fast his heart thudded painfully in his chest. Was Mara taking him on the move again? But no, he heard her confused tones and realized that she didn’t know what was going on either.

“...just like to give you something,” a quiet voice explained, “fill it up with something from the bakery. Really, thank you so much, Doctor. We were all so worried about him.”

Mara tried to protest, lightly, but the individual had already picked up the bag and started carrying it away. Where was Virgil headed? Mara was going to be so angry with him. Especially if he was caught.

After a minute, he was set down on another surface. A human hand reached in and placed a dense, warm package wrapped in paper inside the bag. It obviously wasn’t Mara’s, but Virgil froze on instinct, his nerves screaming that the touch of a human being brought nothing but pain.

The human filled the bag with more packages. They were soft, and they smelled amazing, whatever they were. Some kind of baked good? They were starting to press into Virgil’s chest and crowd his entire body, though. If he weren’t trying not to be seen, he would try and move to get some of the weight off.

Clearly determined to stuff the bag as full as possible, the human gave it a shake and thrust another one in. It hit Virgil at a bad angle, just as he was taking a breath. His lungs collapsed with an embarrassingly squeaky  _ whoosh;   _ sometimes he’d wondered if Mara had run out of building materials and made his lungs out of one of her dog’s leftover toys or something.

He knew the human heard him when the activity outside the bag stilled. Then hands were digging through the bag, sweeping through the substantial pile of wrapped goods. Despite his efforts, the hands found him easily and lifted him into the air.

Virgil hung limp, keeping his eyes open so he could get a good look at the human. They had short brown hair and a trace of stubble on their chin. They wore woolly black clothes, much different than Mara’s light lavender-scented blouses, and a black stone hung around their neck. Their hands and forearms were dusted in flour. They were only the second human Virgil had ever seen.

The human frowned at him, turning him this way and that in their hands. They definitely seemed put off to find something as strange as him in the esteemed village doctor’s bag.

The human squeezed Virgil’s chest – on accident, or in an attempt to hear the wheezy sound? Pain blossomed in his ribs as if they’d broken...he hated that Mara had made him so fragile! Virgil couldn’t control a quick grimace of pain. Then bam – he was back in the bag, where the human had dropped him in shock.

The jig was up, but now that it had happened all Virgil felt was mild irritation, as if he’d finally managed to overload his anxiety. “Well,” he said, voice muffled and hoarse from how long it’d been since he used it, “I’m sure the doctor would appreciate it, but I think you’re packing this bag too full…”

“I’m sorry,” the human said, “did you just–”

“Yeah.”

The human looked around wildly, as if looking for someone to confirm what they’d just heard, and only then did Virgil get scared. “Hey, don’t tell anyone, okay? Please. She–she’ll be mad.”

“‘She?’” the human repeated. “Doctor Mara?”

“Yes. Her. The dollmaker...listen, do none of you humans know about this?”

“Know about what?”

“What she does to us.”

“What she – what?”  The human loomed over the bag, bewildered. “What are you talking about? She’s just a nice old lady. She’s fixing up Sloane right now.”

“Yeah, she’s good at that. She’s had a lot of practice.”

The human stared at him for several seconds longer before they noticed the myriad of scratches and scars on Virgil’s skin, and it clicked. “No way. Oh, God, no. What the fuck?”

Virgil tried to sit up and winced. “Right.”

“What’s your name? Do you even have one?” the human said urgently. “Do you need to escape? I can help.”

Were other humans this nice? They’d known living dolls existed for barely a minute, and already this person was willing to save him. Virgil almost wanted to cry. Instead, he shook his head. “The best thing you could do is forget about me. Do you have a name?”

“I’m Elliott.”

“Elliott...she’s going to be angry if she knows someone saw me. And, uh...do you know how to fix cursed dolls?”

“Um...no?”

Virgil touched his chest, wincing. “Then I need her to fix this for me.”

“Oh my God, did I hurt you? I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. You didn’t mean to drop...um, packages on me.”

“It’s lemon poppy seed bread. I’m learning to bake.”

Footsteps echoed softly in the hallway. Virgil recognized them because they were the only footsteps he’d ever heard. His face paled. “Cover me. Now.”

Thankfully, Elliott didn’t hesitate. They scooped up a few warm bread rolls and buried Virgil beneath them just as Mara padded into the kitchen.

“Sloane is resting, but he’ll be fine,” she said pleasantly. “Bread rolls?”

“Yes, ah, lemon poppy bread. I made too many.”

“It’s fine,” she said kindly, slipping the bag over her shoulder – at least Virgil guessed that was what happened based on the sudden movement. “I can carry some if I need.”

Was Elliott still looking at the bag? Virgil prayed they were a good enough actor to hide their shock. Elliott and Mara exchanged a few more pleasant words before Mara excused herself home. 

The walk back was chillingly silent. When they were back inside the cottage, Mara set the bag down heavily, scooped out Virgil, and flattened him out on the sewing table. “They didn’t see you, did they?”

“No.”

Her thumb, which held him down on the table, pressed into his bruised ribs. How had she even know he was hurt there? “Now listen, Virgil,” she said pleasantly. “No matter what happened, the consequences will be so much less severe if you tell the truth. Did Elliott see you?”

“No.”

She studied him for a long, heartstopping moment before nodding once. Then she fingered the scalpel left lying on the table, and Virgil felt sick all over again. “Now, where were we…”


	3. I won't be in this hell forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil has a conversation with the yellow-eyed doll.

The only living thing Virgil could have regular conversations with was the yellow-eyed doll whose glass cage was situated right next to his.

It wasn’t like the doll was a bad conversationalist or anything. He was just a little cagey and hard to understand. And, well, it might be rude, but the terribly marred, raw left side of his face made Virgil nervous. Their faces were the same. It was a reminder of what could happen to Virgil at any moment.

They sat with their backs to each other, leaning against the glass walls of their cages. Virgil examined the tiny cuts and wounds that had been opened on his forearms today – Mara had been dabbing some kind of new salve on them, seeing how long they took to scab over. The yellow-eyed doll’s face was started to scab over too, making it greenish and blotchy.

Virgil hadn’t told him about his encounter with Elliott. He didn’t trust the information with anyone, not even the other dolls.

A scratching sound beneath his feet nearly made him jump out of his patched-up skin. He could almost feel the yellow-eyed doll roll his eyes. “Take it easy, it’s the dog.”

Mara’s little white dog scratched once more at the high counter, then gave up. Its name was Lily or Lacy or something. The only thing Virgil cared about was that it couldn’t reach the dolls; it definitely seemed a little too interested in chewing up anything that moved.

“I knew a doll who really loved that thing,”  the yellow-eyed doll said. Was that wistfulness in his voice? Or resentment?

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He must be dead now.”  The doll’s hand drifted up to touch his face. “He’s the reason this happened.”

“What happened, exactly?”

The doll snorted. “Curious, aren’t you?”

“I guess. Sorry.”

“Whatever.”  He paused. “No problemo, kiddo!”

This time Virgil didn’t just jump, he flailed. He skittered away from the wall to check behind him, but it was still just the yellow-eyed doll in the case next to him, who was now cackling at his reaction.

“Your voice – it sounded totally different!” It was cheery, singsong, almost comforting. The yellow-eyed doll was usually anything but all of those things.

“We all have the same voice, so it’s not that hard,” the doll said, but he sounded a little smug. “It’s just changing the pitch. Your voice –”  suddenly his voice dropped to a raspy, eerily familiar drawl – “you’re like this, you get extra deep when you’re in pain or scared, you get a little snappy when you want to hide how insecure you are.”

“I do not!”

“‘I do not!’” he mimicked, and Virgil shut up right away.

“Anyway, that voice from before? That’s the one who loved Lacey. That’s Patton. He was...a special guy. Even the good doctor acknowledged that.”

“Can you tell me about him?” Virgil asked. He would never admit it, but he really wanted to meet a doll with a voice like that.

“All right. Patton was a favorite of the doctor’s, originally created to be her assistant, unlike the rest of us. He was the only one who had free reign – he was almost never locked up in these glass boxes. In fact, it was hard for him to believe she was as cruel as we told him.” He knocked on the side of his wall.

“Patton made friends with me...well, he made friends with everyone. But I was the one who convinced him to help me escape. We switched clothes. I mimicked him perfectly. I thought I could walk free. Patton would tell Mara that he had been tricked, and hopefully she’d take mercy on him. But that dog sensed something wasn’t right and attacked me. Lots of chaos. Patton fled in the attempt. In the end, one doll was gone, and I was the one remaining...so I was the one who paid the price. Mara burned me to teach me a lesson.” The doll gingerly touched his face.

“And Patton is still out there?” Virgil asked. His companion just shrugged.

“I still want to escape,” the doll said abruptly, eyes glinting gold as he straightened upright. “It’s not over. I won’t be in this hell forever. I won’t let it end here. We’re worth more than this.”

“I gotta say, that’s hard to believe,” Virgil said softly.

“Virgil...would you be willing to assist me? The other dolls don’t like me; they think I got Patton killed. I will only accept cooperation from someone I absolutely trust.”

Virgil’s heart raced just thinking about disobeying the Dollmaker. He looked into his friend’s gleaming eyes, then down at the fading scars peppering his arms. He nodded. “I will.”

“Good. I’ll keep you updated.”

Later that night, Virgil was wide awake. He stared at the rumbling furnace, listening to its hypnotic groan. Then, just for a second, a flash of blue darted in and out of the tiny crevice underneath it.

Virgil held his breath. Other nights he might have chalked it up to paranoia, but from what he had learned today…he didn’t think they were alone.

 


	4. practice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil and his friend carry out an escape plan.

“Your plan is POISON?”

“What other ways could we kill a human? We’re dolls,” Virgil’s yellow-eyed friend said, turning up his palms. “Also, I’d just love it if you shouted that a little louder.”

“Sorry.”

The other doll glanced warily around the room before continuing, but Mara was occupied with a visitor in the front room. “I’ve heard some things,” he said. “For example, that plant –” he pointed at a window on the east end of the room, one so thickly covered in bushy flowers it was almost impossible to see out of – “is called aquilegia. The root is medicinal, but the seeds can kill.”

“And we just...what? Sprinkle it into her food?”

“She eats in the front room. We’ll throw some seeds in and she won’t know until it’s too late.”

Virgil sat numbly. To kill Mara...to topple that giant who only kept him around to bring him pain? If it was how they could escape, he couldn’t see how he could object. “What about the other dolls?”

“What about them?”

“Well, we’ll have to rescue to all of them too, right?”

“I didn’t take you for the noble type,” the doll said with a trace of disgust. Virgil looked at him, shocked, and he relented. “Fine, we’ll see what we can do about them. For now? Our priority is getting ourselves out of these cases.”

The two discussed their plan in hushed tones before the curtain rustled and Mara reentered the doll room. Dread welled in his stomach like a bubble of tar as his suspicions were confirmed – Mara was, again, heading for his case today.

As he was carried off, his yellow-eyed friend caught his eye – good luck. He’d need it.

***

“Why,” managed Virgil, “do you do this?”

The pain was particularly bad today. Mara was tinkering away, doing some kind of surgical work in his ribcage. Nameless metal instruments pinned his skin open so she had room to operate. This pain was hot, wretched, and it sliced a wide swath over his chest that made it hurt to breathe. The hard thump of his heart (could she see it? he couldn’t tell) reminded him of the devastation one finger of hers could do if she slipped. But her hands were steady and merciless, as usual.

“Practice,” Mara said, too absorbed in her work to elaborate, or tell him off for speaking at all.

“No….” Virgil wished he was able to say more. He wanted to scream that practice wasn’t a reason to give dolls useless life. Practice wasn’t a reason to slice them open day after day. For all she said the dolls gave her a better understanding of the human body, he’d come to realize she didn’t even build them with articulated detail. They were just fabric skin and bloody muscle wrapped around blocks of bone. A brain, a heart, a decent face, a ribcage, limbs...and that was that. 

“Isn’t it boring?” Virgil tried. “You’re a master surgeon, but you’re basically just dissecting meat. You made us yourself. There’s nothing new to keep you coming back.”

The brief crease in Mara’s forehead, as if she was stifling a laugh, told him all he needed to know. The very fact that she could put the little dolls through so much hell all on her own...that was reason to keep coming back, all right. She enjoyed the pain she put them through. Virgil wondered if Mara could see his blood boil.

Virgil lay in a stupor for a while longer before his opportunity came. Mara went to answer the door for another house call, as she was often interrupted by. Immediately, Virgil peeked around the operating table for the smooth, two-inch needles she often used to sew them back together. That was what the yellow-eyed doll had tasked him with: according to him, the needles could pick locks. They just needed one.

He had difficulty moving. His chest was bloodied, but at least it’d already been sewn shut with the Dollmaker’s neat, tiny stitches. Still, his attempt to wriggle his way over the table sent pain lancing through his torso.

A needle was just within reach, but when Virgil grasped it, another thought struck him – how would he get it off the operating table? Mara would be back in minutes; absolutely no way would she allow him to take a needle back.

He had to hide it. Where?

He couldn’t fit it in his jacket; she would surely see the outline through his clothes. But Virgil looked down at the neat straight line of stitches down his chest and a horrible idea struck him.

The needle, two inches long, was about the same length as his forearm...that would work for this.

Virgil took a sharp quick breath to steel himself and pressed the point into his wrist. The pain wasn’t that bad, he told himself, he had dealt with worse. Sweat beaded over his forehead as the needle slid underneath his skin.

When Mara brought him back to the cage, he held his arm still and she didn’t notice a thing.

***

The yellow-eyed doll whistled softly as Virgil revealed the needle. “Can you move that arm?”

He flexed it, gently. It was bleeding kind of a lot, and he was fairly sure he’d messed it up internally somehow. But it didn’t matter, did it? Eventually, he would get fixed up. And broken again. So the cycle continued. Unless this plan worked, of course.

The lock on the glass cage had a metal slot accessible from the inside, but when Virgil inserted the needle – with the blood mostly cleaned off on his jacket – it just clinked around uselessly.

“Follow my instructions,” Virgil’s friend whispered. He was on high alert for Mara, as usual. Virgil knew he was nervous because he kept touching his scabbed-over face. “‘Put the needle in. You need to move it until you feel it catch on a tiny clasp…”

He was positive it would fail. But, though it took an agonizingly long amount of time, Virgil felt the pressure give inside the lock, and the needle turned. The two dolls let out long breaths. Then, timidly, Virgil nudged the door. It swung open.

“Now let me out,” the yellow-eyed doll said, voice strained with impatience. “She might wake up soon – hurry!”

“I am!” Virgil had already jumped out and was digging the needle into the lock on the second cage. It was tricky to do from a completely different angle, but he freed his friend without any incident.

As quietly as they could, they raced over the counter. They had to pass by the glass cages of other dolls on the way. Some were sleeping, some watched them wide-eyed. Virgil slowed, itching to free them, but the yellow eyed-doll pulled him along with a gloved hand. “Worry about them later!”

The window was open just the barest crack. A cool breeze whispered through. Virgil and the doll stuck their hands in the tiny opening and pulled, but the window was too heavy for them to lift.

“We can reach it anyway,” the yellow-eyed doll decided, kneeling down. The aquilegia plants grew so thickly that a branch of leaves and flowers poked into the room. The flowers were pretty and all, but their interest lay in the dry brown seed pods, which held the poisonous materials they were after.

The yellow-eyed doll took hold of the branch and, very gently, pulled it further into the room. The plant rustled loudly as it squeezed through the crack, and Virgil seized the nearest seed pod and yanked. But he’d underestimated the amount of force it took. The spring of the branch snapping back threw his balance off, catapulting the pod out of his hands. 

Virgil grabbed for it, but the pod fell past the smooth white counter and dropped all the way to the wooden floor far below. The yellow-eyed doll, leaning over the edge to look for it, shook his head. “We can’t leave it there or she’ll see it. We’ll climb down and pick it up.”

Carefully, they slid down the counter, using the cupboard doors as ledges. Virgil reached the ground first and picked up the seed pod. The dolls looked back up at the cupboard, considering how to climb back up.

Virgil tucked the seed pod into his jacket to free his hands. “Well,” he said, “I guess we could–”

The yellow eyed doll lunged at him before he could blink. They went skidding over the ground. Virgil wheezed and tried to speak but the doll, on top of his chest, pressed his arm into Virgil’s mouth to muffle him and fiercely whispered: “Lacey!” 

The little white dog had sensed the commotion, left Mara’s bedroom, and trotted in to explore the workshop. Staying silent was no use: Lacey spotted them immediately. The dolls backed into the cupboards as far as they could, but there was nowhere to run. The dog bounded over to them and practically drove its jaws into them, tail wagging with intrigue. 

Each of its teeth were almost as big as one of their hands. If it took one bite out of them, that would be an injury even Mara couldn’t repair. 

“Hey! Lacey, stop!”

The voice was familiar to Virgil, because it was  _ his  _ voice – the voice all the dolls shared. But he had never known the dog to obey one of the dolls. And yet Lacey sat obediently, still eyeing the dolls over.

Another doll jogged over to them. He took a second to scratch Lacey’s neck (as high as he could reach) and soothe the dog, distracting her from her targets. “Shh, it’s okay, puppy! They’re friends.”

The yellow-eyed doll made a noise in the back of his throat. He was staring at the doll with a pained expression, his fists clenched tightly. He looked as though he was all the way back in some painful memories. Virgil recalled the voice the doll had used once, when he was mimicking an old friend of his, and he knew – this was the doll who had failed to help him escape. This was Patton.


	5. virgil, we're leaving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil encounters Patton and his friends.

“You…” said Virgil. “You’re Patton, aren’t you?”

The doll looked at him quizzically. He had tiny glasses perched on his face; Mara’s dolls often ended up with a chronic vision problem matching hers. He had pale blue eyes. A gray sweater was wrapped around his shoulders. “That’s me!”

“Patton,” the yellow-eyed doll growled, taking a step forward.

Patton looked at him and his face softened. “Kiddo...it’s been a while.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Well, what do you want me to call you? You never told me your name!”

“Never mind that!” the doll snapped. “What are you doing here? We all thought you were dead!”

“No, I never left! The others and I, we’ve been hiding under the furnace. We’re trying to find a way to get you all out of here.”

“Others?” Virgil asked.

“Yes...sorry, kiddo, what’s your name? Can you explain what you’re doing with him?”

“I’m Virgil,” Virgil said, not entirely liking the way Patton said ‘him.’ “We were trying to escape. And, um, kill Mara.”

Patton’s hand flew to his mouth. After a second, he nodded grimly. “All right. Please, come with me, won’t you? I think Roman and Logan would like to talk to you.”

***

With Patton at their side, the dog didn’t pose a threat to them. The blue-eyed doll led them to the furnace, which, to beings as small as them, was oppressively hot. To Virgil’s surprise, Patton knelt down and started wiggling his way under.

“It’s hot, but it won’t kill us,” he said, coughing. “And Mara can’t reach us under here, even though she’s tried.” Virgil flashed back to the three white bandages often wrapped around Mara’s fingers – as if she’d thrust her hand someplace and only come out with a burn.

The three dolls crawled on their elbows and knees under the vast metal block. The roar of machinery hurt Virgil’s ears. Every time his head or arms accidentally brushed its surface he got a little more cooked. It was especially torturous because he could feel the strain he was putting on the deep, newly-sewn cut in his chest.

At last, in what he guessed was the heart of the furnace, the dolls reached a square of empty space. It was only about nine inches wide and nine inches tall, just barely big enough for a doll to stand up in. The dark gray corners were stuffed with odds and ends: bits of rusty jagged metal, smooth round buttons, and scraps of patchy and torn fabric in an array of faded colors. It seemed Patton spent his nights sweeping the ground for any dropped object that could prove useful.  It became immediately clear to Virgil that Patton was not the only one sweeping away the Dollmaker’s leftovers, though – the furnace was already occupied by two more dolls.

Virgil looked at their eyes first - one’s irises were red and the other’s dark blue. They both seemed surprised and angry to see him, until he realized they weren’t looking at him but at his friend.

“You!” the red-eyed doll hissed. He unsheathed a long shard of metal – maybe a broken-off chunk of a scalpel – and pointed it at him. “You have some nerve showing yourself here, villain!”

The yellow-eyed doll raised his hands. “I didn’t do anything!”

“You almost got Patton killed! You lied to him!”

“What an accusation!”

“Hold on,” the third doll, the navy-eyed one with the tie, said sharply. “Patton, why did you bring more dolls here? How?”

“They were trying to escape. You two, this is Roman and Logan.” Patton gestured at them.

The yellow-eyed doll looked away, and for some reason it made Virgil hesitant to give his name too. So instead he just nodded at both of them.

Roman scowled. “You there, I hope this one here hasn’t roped you into his scheme. Do you know what he did to Patton?”

“Um, helped him escape?”

“False! He knocked Patton out and switched clothes so Patton would take the heat and distract Mara from his escape. Thank goodness his plan failed!”

“That’s not what he told me!” Virgil protested.

“This one is a known liar,” Logan told Virgil, almost confidentially. “He has a history of refusing to reveal his name, lest he make himself vulnerable. Of course, I know it, seeing as I know how to read.”

“Ooh, do tell!” Roman encouraged.

The yellow-eyed doll snarled and stepped toward Logan. “Do  _ not!” _

The tension in the tiny pocket space was even less bearable than the heat. Patton raised his hands. “Everyone calm down,” he said softly. “The past is the past, okay? Logan, we need to work together.”

Logan nodded stiffly. Roman kept glaring daggers at the yellow-eyed doll.

“What’s your story, anyway?” Virgil asked, addressing Roman and Logan. “How long have the three of you been hiding under here?”

Roman whistled. “Oh, who knows by now.”

“You’re one of the Dollmaker’s newest creations?” asked Logan. “Virgil, perhaps?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“I’ve seen your plaque.”

“How come some of you can read and I can’t?”

“Oh, there’s only been a handful of us who can read,” Logan said, straightening his shoulders. “Before Mara learned better, I would say she gave the ability to the first five of us.”

“The first five? Like, ever?”

“Yes. I should explain myself. I, Logan, am the first doll Mara ever created, four years ago.”

“Wow,” Virgil muttered, caught with the sudden feeling that he was looking at a relic. Dolls tended to come and go, cases going empty and filling again at a rate of once every two or three months. He’d felt like his time was coming for a while, as if one day one of Mara’s repairs just wouldn’t stick. Living a whole year, let alone four, was unimaginable. 

“In the beginning, her reasons for dabbling in the art of creating life were much more altruistic,” Logan said. “She only wanted a research assistant. She created me and gave me all of her knowledge, then supplied me with book after book so I could absorb their contents. But, when she started taking the techniques I suggested and practicing them on other, living dolls...well, I couldn’t take it anymore. I fled. Roman and Patton joined me at various intervals thereafter.”

“Are you saying you’re four years old too?” Virgil asked the yellow-eyed doll.

He shook his head. “About three. The point is I’ve been around for a while. These three don’t have the spine to get anything done. Even now, we’re wasting time.”

“It’s too dangerous to leave now!” Patton protested. “You’ll just make the Dollmaker angry and put her on edge. We’re working on a plan to free every doll at once.”

“What was  _ your  _ plan, anyway?” Logan asked.

“Poison.”

“With the aquilegia, I’m guessing?” The yellow-eyed doll nodded. Logan just rolled his eyes. “As if that’d ever work – as if a healer wouldn’t notice pure poison sprinkled in her food.”

“We could pull it off!” Virgil’s companion hissed. “You’re the ones interfering, not us. If you let us carry out our plan, well, she’ll keel over anyway and you’ll get the happy ending for all the dolls, like you want so badly.”

Roman pointed his scalpel chunk at him. “I swore long ago never to leave this place until Mara had been brought to justice. You don’t think the three of us have been baking ourselves in this furnace for fun, have you?”

“Our chance of succeeding is so much better if we work together!” Patton added.

“Enough,” the yellow-eyed doll growled. He whirled to Virgil. “Well, Virgil! What do you think? Whose plan is right?”

“I, uh…”

“It’s not about being right or wrong,” Patton said gently. “We’re all hurting. We just want to get out of here, kiddo.”

“I...I choose him.” Virgil nodded to the yellow-eyed doll. “I’ve just...known him for longer. It seems safer to pursue what we set out to do, now that we’ve come this far, instead of waiting for your plan to go into effect. Whatever it is.”

“Unbelievable!” cried Roman.

The yellow-eyed doll smirked, but Virgil said “Wait. Give them the needle.”

“The needle..? Oh.” The yellow-eyed doll brought the needle they’d freed themselves with out of his long-sleeved top. Unlike Virgil, his method of transportation hadn’t been horribly painful. “Take this,” he told Roman, Logan, and Patton.

“A weapon!” Roman declared.

“No, imbecile, it’s for unlocking the cages. Am I right in assuming it’s part of your bid for freedom?”

“Yes, actually,” Logan said softly. He took the needle from the doll, frowning at the dried blood that flaked off at his touch. “We were trying to circumvent the fact that Mara locks up all her tools at night.”

“Well then, no need to worry about it now,” the yellow-eyed doll said, turning on his heel. “Virgil, we’re leaving. And I mean LEAVING. These ones can worry about their escape plan after we’re gone.”

“You really think your plan will work?” Virgil asked the dolls.

“Of course, kiddo,” Patton said. “Logan here is the smartest doll ever made.”

“Smarter than Mara, at least,” Logan muttered. “It’s not too late for you to stick with us down here instead of HIM.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

The two dolls crawled back the way they came. Virgil’s stomach had been agitated so much that his injury broke open and started bleeding, leaving a bloody smear behind him. The yellow-eyed doll didn’t slow down once. He kept muttering to himself. He was more furious than Virgil had ever seen him.

“We’re getting out,” he demanded of Virgil the second the two were free of the furnace. “I don’t care about the seeds anymore, we’ll come back later. We need to get out of here. Now!”

“That’s not – “ but the yellow-eyed doll raced across the floor so fast Virgil lost his chance to argue. He understood the feeling; after the furnace, he felt sticky and burnt. He itched for any taste of cool outside air. He wanted to believe that the searing furnace and the insufferable glass prisons weren’t their only two options forever. 

They burst past the curtain that hid the workshop and into the front room, a cozy place, rarely seen, where Mara entertained visitors. Virgil’s heart thumped with anticipation. The door loomed in front of them: oaken, solid, and impenetrable. Virgil ran his hands over the wood as if searching for a flaw, but there was nothing.

“What do we do?”

“Keep looking. There must be another way – Virgil, over there!”

To the right, a sturdy wooden dresser was pressed against the wall. Though it wasn’t near a window, a shaft of faint dawn light gleamed underneath it. Sure enough, when Virgil pressed himself to the ground to see beneath the dresser, he could see that a crack ran up the side of the otherwise-solid house. It looked just wide enough to let two dolls through.

Virgil and the yellow-eyed doll ran up to the dresser and searched it. It was flush against the wall, but they could reach the gap if they crawled underneath.

“Just like the furnace, one last time,” the yellow-eyed doll said breathlessly. “Hurry. She might wake up soon.”

The crawlspace was no roomier than the furnace. Virgil was once again forced to squeeze himself by on his forearms and knees, his torn stomach screaming to be healed. It wasn’t hot, but the ground here was even harder to traverse. It seemed to be tugging at his skin and clothes, slowing his progress. It was...sticky.

“Oh no,” Virgil rasped.

The floor was soaked in some kind of gluey, viscous fluid that caught on their bodies and quickly hardened. It was a trap. Virgil tried to move forward, then back the way he came, but he soon realized with dread that he was utterly stuck to the ground.

The yellow-eyed doll struggled furiously. “This can’t be it!” he yelled. “This ISN’T it! I told you we wouldn’t be trapped here any more!”

“Please – just calm down and think –” Virgil’s eyes were fixed on the gap in the wall, but as the early sunlight smeared over the ground, he realized that the crack shone with its own reflection. It was a  _ window _ . Even if they had made it past the glue, Mara had planned this all along. She’d purposely set the bait.

The doll screamed, one long furious note, and then the dresser tipped over with a horrible bang. Mara towered over them, her face twisted with cold fury.

She knelt down and poured a sickly, stinging liquid over the carpet. It dripped into Virgil’s face, burning and half-blinding him. He heard the yellow-eyed doll gag. The liquid – alcohol, maybe – ate away at the glue, but Mara snatched them in one veined fist before they could even think of moving.

She stared down at them, wrath etched into every wrinkled line of her face. “Well,” she whispered, “whose idea was this?”

  
  



	6. virgil's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Dollmaker inflicts a punishment.

“Virgil’s.”

Virgil didn’t comprehend the yellow-eyed doll’s statement at first. But as his companion continued to speak, a knot of terror and heartbreak formed in his chest like ice.

“Virgil’s idea,” the doll repeated, a note of skillfully crafted panic rising in his voice. “P-please, he – he threatened me! He broke out and forced me to come with, to bait the dog...I never wanted to leave! I learned my lesson! Mara, please!”

“He’s lying!” Virgil croaked. “He came up with the plan!”

“Please, Mara, I’ve been here for years, I don’t want to get hurt any more, please –”

“No, he’s  _ lying!” _

“Shut up!”

The dolls’ voices died as Mara squeezed them so tightly Virgil thought his chest might collapse under the pressure. Still he squirmed, trying to avoid those horrible pale eyes, but they were not fixed on him.

“You,” Mara hissed, “have deceived me for the last time, –” 

Mara had just said something, her lips formed a word Virgil did not know, and he was sure it had been the yellow-eyed doll’s name. But the panic was bubbling into his mouth and eyes and nose now, swamping him, and he could no longer process what she was saying. He’d had these before, these anxiety attacks that made every hair and nerve stand on end, but he’d never felt like his heart might burst like this.

She strode across the room, screaming at them while the yellow-eyed doll screamed back. It was all Virgil could do not to throw up. 

“the consequences,” Mara was saying, “are always so much more severe if you lie,” and a blast of heat rattled Virgil’s flesh. They stood in front of the open furnace, now, and the flames roared in a thick solid sheet. What were they doing here, was she trying to get to Patton?

Mara shook Virgil into her other hand. He had a moment of squirm and breathe freely until her fist closed around him again. “Watch,” she said icily. Virgil stared blankly at the flames, the dancing light and heat going straight to his head.

The scream of pure agony of the yellow-eyed doll as Mara tossed him into the fire broke Virgil from his daze. 

Suddenly he could only watch with horror sharp as broken glass as the flames consumed the only one who’d resembled his friend – bitter and spiteful though he was, and even though in his last moments he’d betrayed Virgil. The burning doll twisted to meet Virgil’s eyes. The ruined half of his face spread along his body like a rash as he turned pink and red and black, pale skin dissolving in the heat, clothes and hair falling away in clumps.

And yet Virgil could still see his lips moving, desperately. He was mouthing something. His name. He was passing on his name. Virgil’s voice cracked as he opened his mouth not to scream but to repeat the motions. He couldn’t figure it out. It was meaningless. He could not tell what the doll was trying to tell him.

Long after the rest of his body had been charred to oblivion, the yellow eyes remained, softening and melting in the heat. Illusions of new emotions came and went as they deformed themselves, first anger and then deep, slanted sadness and then what looked like profound relief as the white plastic beaded and dripped from the golden irises like tears.

Long after Virgil’s punishment had been doled out – because watching another doll burn alive wasn’t enough, not when the crime was disobeying the Dollmaker – he kept shaping that word with his mouth, the name he’d failed to hear twice and failed to read too many times, and would now never be offered to him again.


	7. might be fun, huh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil's recovery is slow, but a plan is set in motion.

“Virgil, can you hear us?”

He could, but he didn’t see the point in responding. It had been several days since Virgil’s companion, the yellow-eyed doll, had burned before his eyes. He still felt sluggish, disconnected. He had never particularly liked life, and now he wanted, more than anything, to just get it over with and die.

But the hand pressed against his cage woke him up more than anything. Patton, Roman, and Logan stood in front of him. It was the dead of night, and Virgil could barely tell them apart. But he knew Patton had spoken because his voice was filled with the kind of gentleness that was uniquely him.

Virgil mustered the energy to nod. Patton let his hand drop and nodded to his friends. Logan stepped forward with a needle, one slightly crusted with dried blood, in his hands.

Seeing it made Virgil’s head spin as the memories of that night came screaming back. “That’s –”

“The needle, er, HE gave us. Yes. We’re unlocking your cage.”

Virgil caught his breath. “What? No, no, that’s how this –”

“Relax. The Dollmaker still doesn’t know we know how to pick these locks.”

“We have a plan,” Roman chimed in. “We’re going around to every cage and unlocking them, then everyone will rush the door on a signal. She won’t be able to stop all of us at once.”

“How many of us are there?” Virgil asked, glancing across the room. It was hard to judge because most of the glass boxes weren’t anywhere near him. His only neighbor had been the yellow-eyed doll.

“Oh, about two dozen?”

“And that should be enough.”  Logan stuck the needle into the lock on Virgil’s box and twisted it, tilting his head and concentrating as he felt for the metal clasps.

“So you can pick locks too?”

“Of course. Where do you think that doll learned this trick from?”

Quicker than Virgil expected, the lock clanked open. Logan opened the door just a fraction of an inch and instructed Virgil to shove it open when the time came. “But be careful not to pull on it. You’ll just close the door again.”

“Right.”

Patton, Logan, and Roman said their goodbyes and slipped off. The room was pitch black and silent, but they had a lot more work to do before Mara woke at dawn.

Before they went, Patton pressed his hand to Virgil’s box again. “I’m so sorry,” he told Virgil quietly. “I wish we could have saved him. Honest.”

“I know,” Virgil said wearily. “I’m just...I’m so tired of this, Patton. When can we get out of here?”

“Soon,” Patton promised. “We’ll escape. And then we can figure out what this existence thing is all about! Hey, you never know...might be fun, huh?”

***

Mara was hard at work at the operating table building another doll. Despite everything, it fascinating to watch. Her hands were deft and quick, something Virgil couldn’t appreciate when she was using those hands to tear into him. The doll, which started as a pile of fleshy fabric, stuffing, and plastic, took shape surprisingly quickly.

There was something uncanny about the texture of its skin and the dull, unfocused look in its eyes. It looked both incredibly lifelike and...well, fake, like a doll. On the shelf next to her Mara kept a tiny vial of concentrated brackish liquid that made Virgil uncomfortable to look at. He had a funny feeling that, once she dripped some of that stuff into the doll, it would make all the difference. 

Virgil was desperately not looking forward to that doll’s completion. For one, it would mean another innocent doll brought to life for the Dollmaker to toy with. For another, he had a sick feeling that the doll would be going into the recently vacated cage next to his. 

He remembered how terrified, hurting, and confused he’d been when Mara brought him into the world and broke his arm. That doll would surely look for comfort and guidance, and Virgil was the last thing who could give it. Lately, his nerves were strung so tightly that he couldn’t even breathe without feeling dizzy. He did nothing but sleep and turn the yellow-eyed doll’s last word over and over in his head, wondering what his name was.

But the very next day was when the dolls’ escape plan came to fruition. They had been waiting for the front door to open, the catalyst for the signal.  Every doll’s head jerked as a person lightly rapped at the front door.

Mara’s hand stilled on the doll she was making. She swept into the front room to answer the door, making sure the heavy curtain hid the entrance to the dolls’ room securely. 

Virgil was still hurting badly after the things Mara had done to him. His body was covered in raw, flayed patches, some of which had barely scabbed over, reminding him uncomfortably of the way his friend’s face had looked. But, as he sat tensely on his knees and listened for the signal, he had never felt more alert.

That grief he’d been consumed with had finally started to melt, reveal simmering fury. He had left a plan unfinished when his friend died, and there was no better time to complete his last wish.

Lacey started to bark.

He heard the conversation in the front room stall; Lacey was a quiet dog and Mara must have been startled to hear her make any noise. But even that was quickly drowned out by the  _ clunk, clunk, clunk  _ of dozens of glass doors crashing open at once, and the rise of a dozen panicked, nearly identical voices shouting madly as they jumped off counters and shelves and swarmed toward the curtain.

Virgil quickly fell behind. The dolls ranged from pockmarked with scars to freshly bloodied, as he was, and he couldn’t move as fast as the others. Lacey burst into view, still barking, with Patton running alongside her. He spotted Virgil, but Virgil waved him away. He wasn’t aiming for the door, not just yet.

Virgil’s jacket was hot and bloodstained and prickly. At first he’d blamed the discomfort on his injuries, but when he took a look at the inside of his jacket, he realized it was covered with tiny, dark objects that clung to the worn fabric. They were seeds – the seeds of the aquilegia pod he had stuffed in his jacket and forgotten about. His quest to poison the Dollmaker hadn’t failed yet.


	8. finishing what i started

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil's conflict with Mara reaches its natural conclusion.

The dolls surged past the curtain and into the front room, where Mara stood in the doorway with a guest. Virgil hadn’t imagined that he would recognize the human, but it was Elliott! They stood frozen with shock, along with Mara, as every doll in the house bolted straight for them.

The dolls were small, but moving as one with rage and fear rising off them in waves, they were frightening too. Elliott had seen one doll before, but faced with so many, they panicked. Their eyes swept over the dolls’ ragged, hacked-upon forms. Then they bolted away before Mara had a moment to speak.

The Dollmaker stood, frozen, as if she couldn’t even conceive of a rebellion of this kind. No doubt she was paralyzed by the thought of Elliott finally revealing her secret. But as the first few dolls fled through the doorway, stumbling into dewy morning grass for the first time in their lives, Mara snapped. She kicked at the dolls viciously, sending several of them rolling. She reached for the doorknob, but Virgil spotted Roman climbing onto her shoe and driving his makeshift sword into her ankle as deep as it could go.

As Mara howled, Virgil turned his attention to his own task. He veered right, to the kitchen table, and climbed the rough wooden table leg, ignoring the way his hands and shoulders burned with the effort. Mara had laid out her uneaten breakfast, including – in the ultimate coincidence – a small loaf of Elliott’s lemon poppy seed bread, which they’d managed to almost kill Virgil with during that one afternoon.

Virgil scooped a double handful of seeds out of his jacket and cast them over Mara’s food, at a loss for where to put them. They seemed most natural blending in with the tiny dark seeds on the bread, so he sprinkled on even more.

Mara was on a rampage. The dolls scattered in the morning sun, but Mara could navigate the outdoors much better than they could. Patton and Roman ran interference while she stormed around trying to grab or step on as many dolls as possible. Through the window, Virgil spotted one doll stumble and fall, his legs crooked and unusable, and two other picked him up under his arms and dragged him away as fast as they could.

“Virgil, what are you doing!” Logan was there, shouting up at Virgil from the ground. “She’ll come back inside any second!”

“I’m finishing what I started!” But Virgil hopped from the table to the chair. Now that most of the dolls had fled, safety in numbers was no longer their advantage.

It was too late for Virgil before he’d even reached the ground. Mara stalked inside, slamming the door with force that made the whole house shake. Her chest heaved with fury. She’d lost most of her dolls already, but her pinched eyes swept the room for any signs of the unfortunate souls left over.

Logan had vanished from sight like the smart doll he was, but Virgil had no choice but to stay, shivering with adrenaline and fear. He crouched down, but Mara headed straight for the little kitchen as if by instinct. Her gaze landed on her plate of food. She plucked a seed off a piece of egg and held it close to her face, then up to the light.

“Poison,” she hissed.

Virgil had had enough. He bounded off the chair and sprinted for the curtain, desperate to get beneath the furnace, anywhere Mara couldn’t reach. But heavy footfalls rattled his balance before the weight of her slipper came down on his fragile body, crushing him to the floor.

Mara knelt, and the pain skyrocketed as the weight of her whole body concentrated on him. “Virgil,” she spat. “So it was you.”

Virgil was dying. Mara was usually so clinical and calculated. Never once had she inflicted pain on him in such blind rage. His ribs collapsed under the pressure, all of them at once, and he heard more bones crack in his arms and legs and was sure those were gone too. His half-healed wounds had burst and soaked the ground with blood. The only reason he hadn’t died instantly was because Mara had left his skull intact. But he couldn’t breathe, could feel the life leaking out of his body, and knew the Dollmaker had finally repeated the mistake she made so often and injured him so badly even she couldn’t fix it.

Mara removed her foot enough to slip off Virgil’s jacket and examine it. She tore the sleeves in half to check their insides, and despite everything Virgil felt a pang of sadness – it was his only possession, he’d been through a lot with that jacket. Mara picked a seed off the fabric, grimly confirming her suspicion.

But she didn’t speak. She didn’t even look angry. She looked at Virgil, whose blood still bubbled out of his throat. She looked back at his jacket. She scooped him up, upsetting his body even further. His bones must be in shards by now.

“I’ve lost quite a lot today,” said Mara with chilling tranquility. “Many years’ worth of toil have escaped. It would be a waste to lose another one. So you, Virgil, will not die.”

Mara carried him back to her workshop and laid him on the operating table, brushing her current project – the half-finished doll – aside. Virgil wanted to laugh. Her, heal this?

With the last of his vision, he watched the Dollmaker pick up that vial of thick liquid, the one she’d been saving to use on the new doll. She unscrewed the cap, carefully placed it on the counter, and upended the entire bottle over Virgil’s chest.

The effect was like nothing else in the world. 

His heart fucking EXPLODED. It was electrifying and numbing, hot and cold and sharp, exuberant and painful in a way that made regular old chest-slicing and arm-snapping pain seem simple to deal with. It was an assault to every sense he had. It was like being burned alive. It filled him with a crackling energy so powerful he truly, finally understood how Mara had created something from nothing and given her dolls life. This was the Something and it was so far beyond his comprehension he wanted to claw his way out of his body then and there.

Long ago, Virgil had given up screaming, but now screaming seemed like the only way he could get this terrible sensation  _ out _ . His lungs were still crushed, and blood burbled from his neck. But he screamed, nonstop, for some length of time he didn’t care to know.

Mara clicked her tongue. “Honestly.” She smoothed him out over the operating table. She seemed to be getting back into her rhythm, the almost trancelike state she went into when she was doing doctors’ work. She picked up the nearest roll of coarse dark string and threaded a needle. With short neat stitches, she sewed his mouth closed. The screaming stopped.

He’d lost most of his blood now, and he wasn’t dead. Anything he had resembling organs had turned to mush and he wasn’t dead. His bones were lacerating his skin and he wasn’t dead. The potion, agonizingly, kept him ticking. His brain had simply forgotten how to die.

Mara started with the bone structure and worked outward, piecing shards together with impossible precision. Virgil could feel all of it, every little click of bone against bone. It was the world’s most frustrating puzzle but Mara kept at it, fueled entirely by spite and the unwillingness to let her final doll die.

When she reached his neck, he paused. His head, the least damaged part of him, was actually in the way, preventing her from accessing his throat properly. So she rolled her eyes and took a short neat scalpel and sliced his head right off.

He’d thought pain couldn’t be so bad now – he’d changed his mind, that was a LIE! Every single thing happening to his body was now both cut off and amplified by a blistering smear of pain like a collar around his neck. Virgil just kept bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding. He wanted it to end. 

It never ended. Did it? He could have been in that house on that table for an eternity.

But after a million years Mara was putting away her scalpel, washing her hands with a damp rag, and propping his headless body up against a shelf.

“I do think that’s the best work I’ve ever done, I suppose,” she murmured to herself, peering at Virgil’s body, while, while crisscrossed with fresh scars, looked practically good as new. Everything was in its place. She’d practically rebuilt him from scratch. The room was dark as though Mara had worked unceasingly from dawn til dusk, which Virgil could believe.

Virgil’s still-sewn head rolled loosely on the counter as Mara replaced her tools. The Dollmaker hesitated, then picked it up between two fingers and delicately placed it next to his body, flat on the severed neck.

“You’ll stay alive throughout the night. Do consider your actions. I hope you’ll regret them by the morning.”

The human vanished, leaving Virgil sitting there, unable to move or scream. Eternity continued in complete, torturous silence.

Then a bright blue-eyed head popped up from beneath the counter, followed by two more. The dolls scrambled to Virgil’s side. All he could do was blink at them, eyes dull and uncaring.

Logan passed over his needle while Patton quickly worked to thread it. Roman laid Virgil’s decapitated body in his lap and positioned the head just so. As they sewed his head back on, and all the sensation flooded back into his limbs, Virgil closed his eyes and considered asking them if they might just stab that needle through his newly fixed heart and end it then and there.

Patton lifted him into a sitting position, and Virgil felt a familiar warmth encircle him. It was his jacket. He vaguely remembered that Mara had left it on the floor. All the bloodstained and torn parts had been cut away, replaced with patches of plaid purple thread. At that moment it was the softest thing he’d ever felt.

Patton, Logan, and Roman knelt beside him, looking at him with concern and love and fear. Patton reached out and squeezed his hand. Only then did Virgil, buried in his new jacket (which had a hood, too!), duck his head and let the tears drain out.

The four dolls escaped under the furnace.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Virgil losing his head is a scene directly inspired by @im-a-space-ace's fanart, since I wanted to have a part of the story where that exact event would happen.
> 
> oof. how are you all doing?


	9. we're worth more than this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue to Virgil's story.

The dolls weren’t quite done yet.

They had never been able to adjust the temperature of the furnace  because it was too hot for them. But the potion Virgil had been doused with hadn’t worn off. During the night, Virgil climbed up to the knob and forced it all the way to the right before he dropped down and rejoined the others.

Within hours, the house turned sweltering. The wooden floors groaned under the heat. As Mara slept soundly, hours after she’d put Virgil through hell, the very air sizzled with smoke.

They took the dog with them. It took all four of them, but they managed to open the front door on their own. Patton called Lacey after them and they all piled on her back and led the little white dog down the road.

The house was in flames before they’d even lost sight of it. Virgil couldn’t stop staring at the inferno raging against the dark night, at the sparks it sent cascading into the sky. Was Mara in there? Had she escaped? They didn’t know, but...the thought made the four of them urge Lacey on a little faster.

“I know somewhere we could go,” Virgil murmured. His voice was hoarse, so the others strained to hear him. “There’s this human...Elliott...”

“How do you know them?”

“Are they nice?”

“I met them when Mara took me into town one time. They seem nice. I…well, I trust them.”

“Then we’ll find them,” Logan decided. “Patton, control your dog. Sandenwood is this way.”

“Getting lost at this point is an adventure even I’m not ready for,” Roman added.

Virgil hadn’t stopped wondering if he was better off dead. He was confused and terrified out of his mind, and yet...he couldn’t deny that he was exhilarated: the fresh night air, the soft laughter of his friends, the thought of tasting lemon poppy bread.

He’d been created for a purpose. All of them had. And now, none of them had a reason to exist at all. Neither did the other dolls (were they okay? where had they gone?) that yesterday had fled into the grass and trees. But by this point their wounds were healing, their spirits were waking up. They were ready to try something new.

Life wasn’t all about pain, he told himself. That was what he’d believed then and he still clung to that thought now. He thought about the yellow-eyed doll saying “we’re worth more than this” and sucked in a breath as he mouthed the doll’s last word and finally realized his name.

“You okay, kiddo?” Patton asked, glancing behind him.

“Yeah,” croaked Virgil. He’d confirm the name with Logan later.

The dog trotted down the dirt road. A sliver of sun appeared on the horizon, mingling with the ball of fire that continued to burn. Soon, the fire would most certainly attract other humans, and their escape would get a lot more complicated. But right now it wasn’t too late to seek out Elliott. To Elliott, and to life.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thank you so much for making it this far!
> 
> I had a time limit from December to April to write this story, but the majority of it was written this April because, you know, procrastination. I've never written something this dark before. I'm pleased with how it turned out, but more than that it just feels really good to have a multichapter story published and completed again.
> 
> Go drink some water and get a snack, and if you have time, let me know in the comments if you liked this story or not! If you want to find more of my less angsty work, you can find me at @the-elemental-sides.
> 
> Thomas Sanders, I am so sorry.


End file.
